Tag: must see

Hunt For the Wilderpeople is among the best movies that 2016 has to offer. It has heart and humor blended with a tonal balance that many directors can only dream of – often managing to be cartoonishly silly and deeply serious in the same breath. It also may star one of the most lovable odd couples ever committed to film – Ricky Baker and Hector “Hec” Faulkner. Julian Dennison is a revelation of charm as Ricky – foster child and gangsta aficionado. He boasts the same rough-around-the-edges earnestness that made the kids…

If you read no further in this review, please take away this. You need to watch Stranger Things, and you need to watch it now. Go home now and binge the eight-episode Netflix original. Not because the story does anything new. It doesn’t. If you’ve seen, Jaws, E.T., The Goonies, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, Scanners, The Thing, Alien, The Twilight Zone, or The X-Files, you’re going to recognize some of the moments, concepts, tropes, themes, and iconography that made those properties so famous. The reason you need to see…

Swiss Army Man is storytelling at its finest. It’s immature, gross, insecure, ridiculous, and deeply, deeply human. Its profundity doesn’t come in spite of its base nature, but because of it. It explores the shame we have in being dead men walking, and the pretense in imagining that we’re more than a brain/soul/what-have-you piloting a walking, talking, farting meat robot. It’s a weird, meandering, sometimes depressing movie that may turn you off entirely, and you absolutely must see it.

The Lobster is a difficult movie to describe, but people who’ve seen Terry Gilliam‘s Brazil will have a general idea of the odd, stilted, cynical humor that makes the film unique in its class. The two films also share semi-sci-fi dystopian premises, but grand production design and a sense of adventure is nowhere to be found in The Lobster. The film is, perhaps, one of the most atypical examples of an indie rom-com that I’ve seen.

If you know who Shane Black is, you likely already know if you’re going to like The Nice Guys. For all the rest of you – As the creator of the Lethal Weapon series, Shane Black is basically the father of the modern buddy cop genre. (He’s also the first dude on screen to ever get offed by a Predator.) Almost two decades later, he reinvented his own take on “Two Wacky Dudes Solving Crimes” with his directorial debut, the wildly deconstructive, and constantly unpredictable, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, This film bears the distinction of simultaneously being the last thing Val Kilmer was in that anybody cared about, and the device that rebooted Robert Downey Jr.’s career post-drug abuse scandal. RDJ returned the favor by bringing Black in as the writer and director of Iron Man 3. Black returned that favor by giving Marvel its 3rd best selling, and by far most unpredictable film.

Captain America: Civil War, is a finely tuned, tightly paced, smartly scripted, big budget, action-packed jamboree. It’s both a continuation of Captain America’s (currently) 5 movie character arc, and the 13th episodic chapter in the ever expanding Marvel movie lineup. Most of all, it’s proof that Superhero films don’t need to be trivial to be fun, and don’t need to be “angsty” to be deep. They simply need creators who get what they’re working with, and why it works. Civil War is quite nearly a damn flawless movie, and it’s an indication that Marvel isn’t losing steam – they’re just getting started.

You had me at “Patrick Stewart: White Supremacist.” Green Room is an unconventional horror film, which succeeds by making believable and uncompromising decisions about how it plays out. To avoid spoilers, I’ll stick with the official log-line: “After witnessing a murder, a punk rock band is forced into a vicious fight for survival against a group of maniacal skinheads.”

The Jungle Book: Jon Favreau’s 2016 “live action” remake of Walt Disney’s 1967 animated adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 collection of short stories. Jon Favreau is a famously analogue director. His 2005 Zathura largely eschewed digital effects for practical props, and when he directed Iron Man in 2008 he refused to film the hero’s digital double in a way that couldn’t have been captured with practical aerial photography. But with the exception of its star, (12-years-old and charmingly rough around the edges) Neel Sethi, as Mowgli, Favreau’s Jungle Book is an entirely digital fabrication. Despite the fact that it apes a live action look, in actuality it is nearly as pure an animated feature as Disney’s original adaptation.

When Harry Met Sally… is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s also incredibly misunderstood. Early in the film, an obnoxious and young Harry, fresh out of college, states that “Men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.” What follows in the film is a long term friendship that falls into sex, and subsequently romantic love. The quote is even repeated at the film’s end when Harry does, in fact, fall in love with Sally. Many have argued that this is the film’s theme and overarching message. A 2014 blog post by Reuters’ Chlo Angyal and another from 2012 by SplitSider’s Blythe Robertson are two recent analyses that support this theory. Both writers argue that the film sends an unhealthy message. I would agree with them that the concept is bullshit. I’m a heterosexual man, and I’m probably friends with more women than men. That said, I strongly disagree that “Men can’t be friends with women” is the theme or the message of the film.

This review comes a bit later than my normal window for plugging movies or shows, but I’m going to make an exception because Aziz Ansari’s 10-episode first season of Master of None (a Netflix exclusive) is one of the rare sitcom experiences that cannot be missed!